A look at 100 inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of literature and popular culture.

Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of war. It was not until the seventeenth century, when the European middle classes had money and leisure, that anything so frivolous as a novel could be sold for entertainment.

Colin Salter traces the evolution of the novel from the earliest examples through to the postmodernist best-sellers of the 21st century in 100 of the greatest novels. For writers such as Herman Melville, James Joyce or Harper Lee the selection is not a difficult one. For Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, the choice is perhaps more difficult.  Each author is given a concise biography and their major novel analysed and then set in context with their other published work.

Readers can become ridiculously well-read in 224 pages.

Authors include: Alexandre Dumas, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Mary Shelly, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Harper Lee, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Louisa M. Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, John Steinbeck, CS Lewis, Jack Kerouac, John Le Carre, Mila Kundera, Joseph Heller, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Miguel Cervantes, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson.

Hardcover, 224 pages